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Steve Fonyo: Out of Order

Steve Fonyo, who raised more than $13 million for cancer research, may have lost his place in the Order of Canada, courtesy of too many convictions for fraud, drunk driving and assault.

Order of Canada medal, left, and Fonyo in 1984 during his run across the country. (TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTOS)

By Kenneth KiddFeature Writer

Sun., Jan. 31, 2010

Steve Fonyo, who raised more than $13 million for cancer research, may have lost his place in the Order of Canada, courtesy of too many convictions for fraud, drunk driving and assault.

But there's one even rarer award that Fonyo won't be forced to relinquish, one he happens to share with Sir Winston Churchill, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Buzz Aldrin, Sir Edmund Hillary, Bob Hope and U.S. General George C. Marshall.

This would be the Variety International Humanitarian Award, given annually to someone who has shown "unusual understanding, empathy and devotion to mankind."

Fonyo was just the 31st recipient when he took the prize for 1985, a year after Dame Vera Lynn had been similarly honoured.

"It's really a stellar cast of individuals," says Bill Hopkins, chief operating officer at Variety International, the children's charity that has raised more than $1 billion (U.S.) since it was founded in Pittsburgh in 1928.

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"He was given the humanitarian award for his accomplishments, which in 1985 were real and legitimate.''

Fonyo was just shy of 20 when he completed his run across the entire breadth of the Dominion, completing a trek his fellow amputee, Terry Fox, had been sadly forced to abandon four years earlier.

"There's nothing to revoke," says Hopkins. "It was for his accomplishments then."

AS IT HAPPENS, this is much the same sentiment that Fonyo himself was broadcasting last week from a B.C. jail, where he's serving the tail-end of his assault sentence after breaching his parole conditions.

He figures he deserved the prize when he received it, and ought to be able to keep it.

But there's something curiously apt about his losing the Order of Canada, yet retaining the Humanitarian Award he also shares with Frank Sinatra. The ballad of Steve Fonyo has always been mercurial.

A high-school dropout, he'd lost a leg to cancer when he was 12. Little wonder that Fonyo duly found sufficient inspiration in Terry Fox to embark on his own sort of run-and-walk across Canada.

That, and the fact they both hailed from British Columbia, was about the extent of the similarities. Where Fox was charismatic, blue-eyed and golden, Fonyo always seemed strangely detached. His manners were crude, his speech awkward.

There was even a species of resentment in the land that someone like Fonyo would dare to walk in Fox's footsteps, sullying the great one's legacy.

Fonyo's journey was mostly met with indifference until he hit the British Columbia border and money, finally, started to roll in. A victory lap ensued at B.C. Place stadium; he'd become a hero of sorts, feted as such.

In the usual ceremony at Rideau Hall, then-Governor General Jeanne Sauvé made him an Officer of the Order of Canada. A month later, it was Sauvé again presenting Fonyo with Variety International's Humanitarian Award at a Toronto gala.

FONYO'S LIFE has been more or less unravelling ever since. He could never really outrun the shadow of Terry Fox nor, it seems, his own dark demons.

By the end of 1987, he'd watched his father die of cancer, split with his fiancée and been charged with impaired driving. Fonyo was also broke, which is why his 1983 Chrysler LeBaron convertible had been seized by the bank for failure to repay a $21,000 loan.

He'd used his beloved red sports car as collateral to finance another charity run, this one the length of Britain, itself a sad denouement that raised little awareness and scarcely any money.

The odd good thing did happen. A group of Vancouver car dealers kicked in enough money to reclaim the Chrysler LeBaron, have it repaired, and then returned to Fonyo.

And he got to carry the Olympic torch on part of its journey to Calgary for the 1988 Olympics.

A year later in Edmonton, though, the artificial leg he'd used to take part in the local Terry Fox Run was stolen from his car, which Fonyo had left unlocked in a parking lot overnight.

It just went on like that, a carousel of mishaps and run-ins with the law, the rubric of which always seemed to be, `what was he thinking?'

This would include the time Fonyo hit his landlord on the head with a crescent wrench, opening a gash that required 29 stitches. Or the time Fonyo was charged with stealing his own car after he'd sold it to a pawn shop. The car in question: A certain 1983 Chrysler LeBaron.

It almost seems inevitable that Fonyo would get caught writing NSF cheques to supermarkets to pay for cigarettes, which he'd then barter for cocaine.

THE REAL WONDER may be why the Order of Canada took so long to disown Fonyo, since one of the first considerations for doing so under the Order's constitution is whether a recipient is subsequently convicted of a criminal offence.

Other reasons include whether a person has made "a significant departure" from "generally recognized standards of public behaviour" or been tossed out of some professional body, such as a law society, all of which could undermine the integrity of the Order of Canada.

Conrad Black, now toiling in a U.S. prison, curiously maintains his position in the Order. Not so Steve Fonyo, who is only the fourth to have been ejected. He joins Alan Eagleson (disgraced hockey czar), David Ahenakew (the aboriginal leader convicted of hate crimes, later overturned on appeal) and T. Sher Singh (a lawyer disbarred for mismanaging client accounts).

The Humanitarian Award, though, is Fonyo's to keep. It's for what he did then, not since, a distinction that gives Variety International's Hopkins a chance to turn philosophical.

"I went to the University of Southern California," he says. "We had a running back by the name of O.J. Simpson who won the Heisman trophy. The Heisman trophy is still in the athletic department because he did it when he was a student.

"We wish we didn't have to claim him now, but you're stuck with that sometimes."

The Humanitarian Award is no different, Hopkins says when asked about other recipients whom many might find objectionable, not least Henry Kissinger and the former, cross-dressing head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover.

"Everyday you learn a little more about J. Edgar Hoover, but at that time, everyone thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

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